The article seems to highlight that the money behind such a big event mainly goes to the hype for games yet unreleased, rather than focusing on praise and even advertising for really high-quality games that are already out.
Sometime I’d like it if video game marketing changed this way - it’s much easier to market a game that already has tons of great reviews, and they’ve kind of generated many gamers that are unsure about any marketing they hear. The streamer I watched the awards with ended up finding out about a previously-released game by a developer he’d really enjoyed, thanks to the show.
These shows are mostly ads. I remember when Candy Crush was popular, and how they were mostly sweeping the awards while also promoting their next thing.
Do we know for sure that the Starfield devs weren’t able to figure out the problems with performance? I find often with companies, the larger they are, the more bureaucracy there is, and the more prioritization of tickets becomes this huge deal, where you even end up having meetings about how to prioritize tickets etc.
I would be surprised if the devs didn’t know what was wrong already, I think it’s more likely that management and higherups doesn’t care about them fixing it right now.
Game devs have many teams all with different jobs, for a big game like this you'd typically have multiple teams dedicated to optimization in different areas (and between them). The specific problem in this case was how the game was communicating with graphics drivers (among others), which for any graphics heavy game is very fundamental to performance optimization. The problems aren't even an after-the-fact optimization sort of thing that teams should have to identify and follow-up on, batching jobs is standard practice when interacting with GPUs whether or not there's a translation layer.
When the devs of a core translation API between two supported graphics drivers that are commonplace in the gaming ecosystem have to write code to specifically fix issues with your application you've done something fundamentally wrong.
A lot of posts like these also seem to imply that the open source community should somehow be less competent than these companies and are surprised that the open source community can fix these issues. But the open source community has a ton of very respectable and extremely smart developers, it shouldn’t be any surprise really.
To be even more direct: there’s a huge overlap between the circles of “works in software dev” and “contributes to open source projects”.
I really try to do different things at home than work, but I’ve definitely contributed fixes to game mods (why do so many modders fail to do null checks before trying to interact with short lived shit like projectiles?) and open source software I’ve needed to do stuff.
Ford did a nice end run on them eventually. He had to do twice. He never liked investors.
At least initially Dodge released a upgraded Ford for their first vehicle before things really got into the make them different for each year to create a reason for customers to buy a new one to replace their current one mode.
Always pretty lame to see weapon nerfs in pvm games since I couldn’t care less what someone’s abusing to hit their endgame quicker.
I don’t play with randoms so for me the fun of stonger gear is that I can fill the rest of my gear with joke gear. Sometimes my group will rock all mines and mortar sentry to try and blow each other up.
Edit: the railgun did need a nerf tho I mainly mean like the other smaller weapon changes.
Im fine with it, it means the game is more balanced overall and other builds become equally viable. At the end of the day it gives more choices for players.
You are probably not shooting unsafe shots. Just switching to unsafe isn’t enough, you have to let it charge above where the safe mode stops. They literally didn’t change anything about the unsafe shots so it should still take 2 hits with these (disclaimer: it may be bugged though. I saw the writing on the wall and stopped using the railgun a while ago, and have still not used one since)
Safe shots now just bounce off the armor entirely so trust me it’s easy to tell if you’re on safe. Anyway here’s video proof of a guy testing it on unsafe mode: m.youtube.com/watch?v=4qWchqvay44
He can get it in 3 if he gets a high charge buts it’s more like 4-5 on average.
always fine with balancing things but this just feels like the usual trend all games have these days where they’ll nerf first then a month from now have a list of buffs.
I could see the urgency of nerfing the railgun because I imagine every little gremlin is abusing it rn. It’s always the small nerfs like -3 rounds in the breaker that I roll my eyes at and wished they’d just wait until they roll out the buffs to do those.
I’m not going to see any gameplay changes while I’m running from 2 bile titans plus horde and my breaker plunks 3 less times.
I don’t see them rolling out major buffs. They are being very careful to avoid power creep. All the people that want Helldives to be a walk in the park are playing the wrong game. Also they can just lower the difficulty and be fine.
Twenty bucks there’s gonna be a big ol post that gets a lot of attention for adding +1 round to ten different guns a month from now.
I’m not sure where you’re getting the “blank wants blank to be blanker” vibes from but you go off.
I personally love the difficulty and to me this is just Nazi Zombies in a reskin. Where the harder difficulties are higher waves… so you’ve gotta run a train, your guns are really only for panic situations, and sometimes the train catches up to you before you grab your packed gun, so you lose it.
That’s wasn’t directed at you directly, that’s why I said lots of people and not you. I’ve just seen a lot of people complaining about it.
I generally agree with your take. I just don’t think they will do a significant buff to anything they debuffed any time soon. I think they are trying to push the players to be more versatile.
You can’t just lower the difficulty and progress though, mats are difficulty gated and with how absolutely gross and ridiculous the player base got (5 missions in a row getting kicked right at extraction) I only solo. :(
Eh, I rarely shoot anything with my breaker besides dumping into a stalker/solo in the way stranglers. On harder difficulties it’s just not worth trying to accurately hit any weak spots on like chargers or anything else that would require precise aiming.
I’m amazed that Bethesda has one of the premier game developers in their stead in id Software and didn’t bother to just use their shit. Instead they actively chased their staff away.
Bethesda the publisher and Bethesda the developer are different things.
The publishing arm seemed to know what they were doing, certainly enough for MS to buy them.
The developing arm is nothing if not consistent. You know what you’re getting into. An RPG, with lots of character build possibilities (even if a particular build overpowered enough for 90% of players to accidentally stumble across it, like Skyrim’s stealth archer build), a handful of memorable NPCs, no real character development, so-so performance, and a shitload of bugs.
If people are still buying them and still not enjoying them I don’t know what to say. It’s like watching Fast and Furious 10, and going “well that’s fucking dumb”.
I saw the ending of the last F&F by mistake (they sold us tickets for a movie that started an hour later), and let me tell you - that was fucking dumb.
I watched the first one many years ago, which appeared to just be Ocean’s 11, but for people who think putting blue lights under your car makes it go faster.
Then I watched F&F9 on Netflix the other month. I don’t remember any of the plot. At one point a car did a Tarzan rope swing.
ID and Bethesda Softworks and both using different custom, proprietary engines. Retraining your entire studio on a new engine is extremely time consuming, especially if it’s a custom engine with limited learning materials, like ID tech. There’s a big cost/benefit analysis there, and frankly, if Bethesda ever did switch engines, I think they’d be more likely to go with Unreal for this reason. Current staff, and certainly new hires, are much more likely to be familiar with it.
Well the Creation Engine and the ID Tech Engine follow two completely different main goals: One is build for wide open spaces and exploration with real time physics while also guaranteeing mod support. The other is build for fast paced combat in closed level structures. And I think especially the mod support is important to Bethesda and its community. That’s also the reason why so many people stick to Minecraft java instead of the more performant bedrock edition.
You can tell this game is beloved. I don’t think I’ve seen this many bugs talked about as funny / cute quirks when they’re just… bugs. It isn’t cats getting drunk in DF, it’s a memory issue that affects your save the longer you play.
It reinforces the idea that the devs are treating players right and making a game that people want to succeed.
I think it’s less bias towards Larian, and more that they did so many things right with BG3, we can accept some bugs, as long as they are working on fixing them. It’s such a massive game with so many moving parts that some bugs are inevitable, but they don’t stop the rest of the game from being amazing.
But whether this stance is going to be accepted (via upvotes/downvotes) in this type of community comes down to a simple popularity contest.
If I thought that Starfield was fun and tried this type of sentiment, I would be downvoted. Would that be because there is some objective measure of quality that separates the two games, or just because more people are fans of Larian than Bethesda?
Personally, I don’t get frustrated so much by the presence of bugs themselves (though it can depend on their impact) as the longevity of some of them. A lot of the bugs were cute in Skyrim, but if you see the same or similar bug in the new game, it gets less cute.
But there could be a part of it that comes from “familiarity breeds contempt”. BG3, while being a sequel to BG2, is new and fresh. Starfield feels like Skyrim in space. Bethesda has been a powerhouse for a long time, while Larian wasn’t as popular going in, so expectations are higher for Bethesda, too.
Though I’ve gotta admit I haven’t played any BG3 and not much Starfield, so this is a bit speculative.
I did say “they did so many things right”, with which I was referring to this objective measure of quality. There is a good reason this game is so universally beloved, and there are good reasons why Starfield isn’t.
If you want a random assortment of these “right things”:
Many, many choices that strongly impact your gameplay (Starfield has few interesting quests, most “choices” lead to the same outcomes)
Very interesting companions that have their own well-defined personalities and perspectives (Starfield/Bethesda companions just don’t have as many interesting things to say/as much cross-interaction)
Dialogues with interesting animations (Starfield/Bethesda dialogues are pretty static, looking at you, since… Oblivion I think?)
Interesting and detailed world design without constant repition and emptiness (Starfield is mostly empty, and mostly not unique)
An interesting story with a few twists (Starfield feels very generic Sci-Fi to me, but your mileage may vary)
Relatively few loading screens for a pretty big world (Starfield has constant loading screens)
Strong replayability due to many different options (Starfield has a few interesting NG+ ideas, but generally isn’t too interesting to repeat)
Should supposed “good” games get a pass? Nay I say both bad and others game be put on the same weighing scale. The subjective “goodness” of a game shalt have no bearing on the sanctity of the product.
Did somebody say “let’s ignore all problems good games have”?
If a game is good, and bugs are getting fixed, why shouldn’t the bugs be viewed more leniently than a non-good game with bugs that are not getting fixed? Why must we view these things as equivalent, when they are different in multiple dimensions?
Have you played the game though? It’s filled to the brim with content. I already have a lot of hours in and I think I’m only about half through the game. You talk to friends and everyone is telling a different story of how they approached a problem in the game. Almost every conversation in the game has voice lines.
It’s absolutely not flawless. Controls are clunky, path findinf of your compagnions is weird most of the time etc. But you absolutely see that this game is a labour of love and not a quick cash grab. Plus again, it’s massive and it’s one of the few games where I actually understand them not being able to fix every bug in the game.
So I wouldn’t say that we lower the bar with them in relation to bugs. They have raised the bar in content and overall quality so high that you are more willing to forgive / overlook a lot of the issues, as long as they are not game breaking.
Obviously it helps that it’s a great game. But I had fun with the bugs. I had one guy who, when pickpocketed, would instantly bolt out the door and down the street at the speed of sound.
Just wish they would have incorporated the fixes into the game engine at some point. I bet some of the devs would have even signed away the code for free or at least very cheap. It was annoying not being able to use mods to fix bugs in Fallout 76 that were patched in Fallout and Elder Scrolls games some as far back as Morrowind. Sure they were mostly rare like being able to get pushed into the void behind what should have been solid meshes and the game engine seeming not to care as you fall endlessly or it crashed.
If the strategy is looking at “what most people use” and “what is overrepresented in the win stats” you will always end up nerfing what is fun and popular.
So I’d suggest smaller changes… off course fix bugs and stuff that does not work as intended… but balance a weapon … and go on to the next. Also decide what a weapon is supposed to do… sniper shotguns should not exist… neither CQB dmr’s.
Nerfing things on a PVE game that’s supposed to be fun shows a lack of creativity.
You can buff the other things while finding better ways to increase the difficulty, instead of just boosting health and throwing more enemies, but that’s the “easy” button.
That’s just false, you’ll end up with Payday 2 where everything is so broken that enemies need to nearly insta kill you from any range to have an actual challenge.
That’s exactly why I super disagree with the idea, “If everything’s overpowered, then nothing is.” All it seems to lead to is a game that’s only dead easy or impossible.
I play DBD, and one of the playerbase’ biggest annoyance is balance by win rate and usage rate. Sometimes an option is just fun and well designed, without being too strong.
It’s especially important to look at what’s fun for multiple players. A good example might be Helldivers 2’s jet pack. Yes, it’s so fun to cover a lot of ground at once, but if the way that’s used is to abandon a cornered teammate to go do objectives while they die surrounded, then it suddenly makes teammates feel slow and useless.
Meanwhile there’s dopamine-driven team synergy potential with the assisted reload weapons. But, there’s not a lot of mechanical information encouraging their use, and it’s pretty simple for people to just use them alone.
I remember TF2’s simple idea where all weapons did more damage the closer you were to enemies, and it demonstrates what I think can be really good balancing design.
It’s also verified by Proton users noting a marked increase in performance with just a code commit. I’d urge anyone not to listen to this troll and go have a look.
This really isn’t a good take when the “random guy” has provided proof, open source code demonstrating, and a relatively easy way to verify his claims (using his code).
It’s all there out in the open if anyone has specific counter points, and this type of thing isn’t an unusual situation with Bethesda developed games, or games on this engine.
It’s clearly not due to obsolete hardware. Not getting 60fps in New Atlantis while playing on a beast with 50-70% usage max points to optimization issues. I honestly don’t know why those people think it’s hardware
I dont understand how this is even an argument dude, bethesda has the worst reputation for this stuff. Literally every game they have released has been buggy as shit with terrible performance, but for some reason people just handwave it and say “its a bethesda game” when did they get so brainwashed, why is it acceptable for them??
Yeah, exactly. I’m getting tired of this too. Even with all of the evidence in the world that this issue is halving game performance people are still dismissing it. $1000 dollars worth of performance I paid for down the drain and yet “a smooth 60 FPS” is enough justification for people.
It’s like if somebody sold you a full-priced V8 that had 4 of the cylinders not firing and your peers telling you to deal with it because “at least it runs”.
It blows my mind how critical everyone was of Cyberpunk, despite it running fairly well on PC especially a few weeks after release, and how much of a pass everyone gives Starfield.
gog.com/…/alpha_protocol_is_back_drmfree_for_mode… is the actual announcement. And the Raycevick sponsored video is 100% worth watching as it very much acknowledges… Alpha Protocol is probably a bad game but it is still fascinating. And then pivots into a strong push for the preservation aspects of things.
Which is a stark contrast to the way that the usual “I downloaded the latest AAA game because i want to preserve it” pisses on the efforts.
Also, bonus points, Raycevick managed to get THE Matt Rorie to talk for like two minutes on his greatest contribution to society and gaming.
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